Taking cognisance of the cyber incident related to CoWIN data in June 2023, Indian Computer Emergency Response (CERT-In) along with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology coordinated incident response measures with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, said in response to a question on leakage of CoWIN app data by Lok Sabha MPs Ravi Kumar and Asaduddin Owaisi.
Mr. Vaishnaw added that MoHFW had lodged a complaint and a First Information Report (FIR) had been registered by a law enforcement agency.
Also read: Explained | What does the alleged CoWIN data leak reveal?
“Also, according to information provided by the MoHFW, the CoWIN portal of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has complete security measures and adequate safeguards for data privacy with Web Application Firewall (WAF), Anti- Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS), Identity and Access Management and regular vulnerability assessment,’’ the Minister’s statement noted.
The statement added that to ensure the safety of personal and biometric data of citizens on the CoWIN app and portal, the MoHFW had brought in measures, including steps by which the beneficiary could access vaccination details via registered the mobile number with OTP authentication only. Mobile number, Aadhaar number and other photo ID card numbers of the beneficiary were masked, and only the last four characters were visible to users (service providers).
CERT-In has empanelled 150 security auditing organisations to support and audit the implementation of Information Security Best Practices, Mr. Vaishnaw told the Lok Sabha.
